It’s bad news to start this Wednesday: Eskom will escalate load shedding to stage 4 at 9am, suggesting a significant deterioration in its generating fleet.
The utility had earlier said it would cut the power at stage 2 — meaning 2GW of capacity is not available to the grid — until 5am on Saturday. Moving to stage 4 means the situation has deteriorated markedly and that Eskom is not able to supply 4GW of power.
The utility blamed further “breakdowns” for the escalation to stage-4 power cuts.
The load shedding at stage 4 will last until at least 5am on Friday. Eskom said it needs to do this to manage emergency reserves.
“It is with a great deal of disappointment that Eskom has to inform the public that further failures overnight of generation units has necessitated the implementation of stage load shedding.”
Eskom said it expects to move back to stage-2 load shedding after 5am on Friday.
“Overnight, a unit each at Kendal, Duvha, Camden and Kusile power stations tripped. Since then, we have returned four units to service. However, these units still need to ramp up to full output, which necessitates a high usage of emergency generation reserves today. This being the fourth day of extremely high diesel usage, the emergency reserves are being depleted faster than they can be replenished,” Eskom said. — (c) 2022 NewsCentral Media
